Wednesday, 17 September 2014

From The Electronic Intifada - Eight activists were arrested after they disrupted a theater performance sponsored by the Israeli embassy in Amsterdam in protest of Israel’s recent assault on the Gaza Strip.

A ninth activist was arrested outside the theater as dozens more protested there.

As the video below shows, the protesters chanted “Free, free Palestine” and “Boycott, boycott Israel” before a one-woman show by Lia Koenig, the Polish-born “first lady of Israeli theater,” at the Theatre de Doelenzaal on 13 September.

The protesters were assaulted by other members of the audience. As one protester shouted, “This is not art, this is an occupation,” he was violently shoved and battered.

Koenig remained impassive throughout the protest, at one point sharing a laugh with Haim Divon, the Israeli ambassador to the Netherlands.

Several members of the Dutch parliament were in the audience, according to the newspaper NRC Handelsblad.

Once the protest was over, Koenig began her performance, joking “I’m honored they came to see me.” She did not address Israel’s massacre of more than one in every thousand Palestinians in Gaza this summer, including more than five hundred children.

“The action was a source of inspiration for Lia,” the show’s organizer Erga Netz told NRC Handelsblad, confirming Koenig’s apparent indifference. “In the rest of her show she made several jokes about it. She did not seem very affected,” Netz added. more